Purpose: The following article examines the playful composing practices of two youth who built on their backgrounds as fan fiction writers, role-players, visual artists and gamers to co-author a multimodal novel across mediated spaces for composing throughout their high school careers. Design/methodology/approach: The study draws on…

In this paper, we take an ecological view of children's development to argue that preventive interventions should move beyond separating the microsystems of school and home to create new intergenerational spaces for nurturing mental wellbeing. Using the 5A's theory of creativity, we draw upon our experiences of creative writing to explore how…

All young people have stories to tell. Yet when children and teens declare that they hate writing or are too embarrassed to admit they like it, elevating their voices becomes challenging. It is urgent that educators, policy makers, youth development workers and leaders, and philanthropists work together to find a way. In the land of free speech,…

In the digital wilds, thriving storytelling practices (often in transcultural and multilingual contexts) share with Maker culture a belief in learning through doing, bricolage, collaboration, and playfulness. Key examples are fanfiction, a form of creative writing that transforms popular media in some way, and interactive fiction, a form of…

Caribbean students are repeatedly engaged in rigid forms of writing to meet the requirements of external exams, which often leads to negative attitudes to writing. With current shifts to multimodal and multi-literate texts to engage students' multiple literacies in learning, students' creation of graphic novels in Caribbean English classrooms can…

Providing students with the opportunity to generate new content and share it with a wide audience invites students to compose texts with the care and conviction that cannot be duplicated when writing solely for the teacher. This piece documents one teacher's effort to engage 99 eighth graders with an authentic writing opportunity: the…

We argue that opening a space for dialogic, imaginative writing in the classroom can create entry points for a culturally responsive writing pedagogy (CRWP). We explore how collaborative writing for a pre-existing community digital platform (FundZa) and audience aids the implementation of CRWP in a creative writing course for South African…

Writing, reading, and dramatic performance have long been powerful means for representing and contending with thorny problems, and the authors see much promise in engaging students in authoring the dramas and solutions that represent their fears and their hopes for resolutions. In this article, the authors share a series of writing activities and…

The "International Society for the Social Studies (ISSS) Annual Conference Proceedings" is a peer-reviewed professional publication published once a year following the annual conference. The following papers are included in the 2014 proceedings: (1) Legal Profession in the Technological Era with Special Reference to Women Lawyers in…

This study investigates an elective English class, in which students in grades 10-12 collectively read and collaboratively wrote fantasy fiction in four groups. The purpose of the class was to have students consider the choices fantasy and science fictions writers, directors, and video game designers make when creating a fictional world. The…

The Zine Project helps students and teachers consider the assumptions and expectations we have about how literacy functions in school and community contexts. In this article, Tobi Jacobi examines the relationships among composition theory, community literacy practices, and service learning, taking into account the complex possibilities and…